Disgruntled woman takes next-door neighbour to task over Airbnb rentals
Madam Wendy Ng said that the frequent comings-and-goings of guests at her neighbour’s home have made her feel insecure over the security of the neighbourhood. Photo: Wee Teck Hian/TODAY
SINGAPORE — Tensions over users of short-term rental services such as Airbnb are rising, and the latest case is a woman who went to great lengths to take her neighbour to task for housing paying guests through the popular home-sharing website.
The authorities here are still considering if they should review the regulations governing short-term stays, to see if they may be eased for private properties.
Right now, regulations by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) state that it is illegal for private-home owners to lease their properties for fewer than six months.
For Madam Wendy Ng, 52, the increasingly frequent comings-and-goings at the four-storey terraced house next to hers have annoyed her so much, she even hired a private investigator.
Madam Ng, the managing director of an air-conditioning company, lives in a similar terraced house at Penaga Place in Sembawang. She has cancelled or postponed all of her firm’s jobs over the last two months to deal with a problem that she said began about two years ago. The regular stream of guests and taxis stopping near her home gave rise to concerns over security.
“Every time, (there are) different faces, that means their faces are not local … so we feel insecure,” she told TODAY, adding that some guests returned or left the house in the middle of the night.
Last August, she raised the matter with the Member of Parliament of her constituency, Mr Khaw Boon Wan, who is also Transport Minister.
Following her complaint, officers from Certis Cisco — the URA’s appointed agent — tried to inspect her neighbour’s premises but the house was locked, so Madam Ng decided to take a different course of action.
She engaged the services of a private investigator in May to gather videographic and photographic evidence of what went on over a week in the property, among other things. The investigator’s report, handed to Madam Ng earlier this month, was submitted to the URA on Friday (July 8).
She said this assignment set her back by “a few thousand” dollars, but she was willing to part with this “expensive” sum.
Madam Ng also filed a petition imploring the authorities to take “immediate action against the errant owner”.
As of Friday, it has been signed by 37 residents in Penaga Place and areas nearby.
There were some Penaga Place residents who said that they were not affected. Mr Raymond Lee, 58, who lives across from Madam Ng, said that there was no disturbance and the area was very quiet. “It’s part and parcel of living in a community. The complaint has no standing,” the business consultant said.
Housewife Fadilah Ishak, 31, urged mutual respect and said that her family’s safety and security were not compromised.
Madam Ng said that the property’s owner no longer lived in the house and a Filipino domestic helper attended to the guests.
On the Airbnb site, the owner, listed as Dione Schick, wrote that she and her husband, William, who were from New Zealand, have lived here for 11 years. They are “offsite” during the week and only at the property “sometimes during the weekends to tend to the garden”.
Mrs Schick has three listings on the site, with a master bedroom on the second floor of her house going at S$70 a night for a minimum 14-night stay. Asked about the concerns raised by Madam Ng, Mrs Schick, who is a Singapore citizen, would only say that they were looking for long-term tenants.
She pointed out that the way buyers and sellers connect around the world was changing radically and navigating that “takes time”. “I’m practising, I’m learning, I’m trying to figure out, I want to stay within the rules,” Mrs Schick said, adding that she felt Madam Ng had not been civil.
When contacted, an Airbnb spokesperson did not answer questions about the home or its listings in Singapore. “If issues do arise, we work with our community to try and resolve them,” the spokesperson said.
Complaints by disgruntled homeowners such as Madam Ng have been growing steadily over the past three years. The URA told TODAY that it has received 259 complaints about short-term stays in the first half of this year alone. In 2013, 2014 and last year, it received 231, 375 and 377 such complaints respectively.
A public consultation exercise done last year to seek feedback on whether short-term stays should be allowed in private homes did not bring about a “clear consensus”, the URA said.
The public acknowledged the need to accommodate demand for short-term home-sharing, but they also strongly endorsed existing URA rules meant to “preserve the privacy and sanctity valued by the vast majority of homeowners”.
Saying it needed more time to study the issue, the authority reiterated that the six-month rule for stays in private homes “must be observed”. ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ILIYAS JUANDA
